The Great Guilt

She ain't going to take any of our shit - (Youtube).

Which great guilt? I, for example, feel guilty of many, many things (but not of my drawings).

Well, to put it simply, we are building a shit-hole of a future world for our kids.
We all know it... and we all know we have no way to avoid it.

It's at least 30 years in the making, ever since the Western world turned its back on Kenesianism.

Or to put in another way, ever since our ruling classes have lost their sacred fear of the great Soviet Bogey Man - or do you think that the social progress from the late 40s to the early '70s was a God-sent miracle?

Ever since then, the concentration of wealth at the top of the social pyramid has gone on unimpeded, with pretty much everybody telling the masses of its inevitability - "Alas, the middle class is disappearing" - Yes, through decades of well chosen political decisions.


By the way, as long as the world is just a dumb conundrum of National interests, each one competing with the others to invite foreign investments by compressing the demands of its workforce or reducing their taxes on capital gains, IT IS inevitable.

And as there is no evidence of any movement toward a planetary government - or even just some truly shared international order - able to curb the worst aspects of a free moving financial capitalism, one  can conclude that we are royally screwed.

More works are going to be outsourced, as they have been outsourced to China and India and now - China isn't that cheap any more - to Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Viet-Nam etc.

That, until he day it will be possible to automatize these jobs with a flexibility approaching that of cheap foreign labour. Then, most works will just disappear.

That day may or may not be near (I refuse to place a bet against the Moore's law (1)), but even now there are plenty of enterprises and researchers working to automatize quite a share of the current workforce(2).

So, twenty-thirty years in the future "good jobs" will be even scarcer than today or, maybe, completely non-existent. And the welfare-state will also be nearly non-existent.

As an economist (3) put it, it is very probable that the 2040 will look a lot like 1840 (4), only with a far more effective policing to cope with the occasional criminal.

To this nice view of the economy our kids will have to live in, we may also add climate change - sorry, but IT is true... we are going to get them[sic] kids well cooked - and all the other small catastrophes that we are duly preparing for them to enjoy (5).

So, how can we protect the kids from the shit world we are building for them, day in day out, with our own very hands?

We can't, no more than we can protect ourselves - beyond the fact that we hope we will be comfortably retired - or dead - by the time these changes will truly impact the world.

So, we construe as ugly monsters the few dangers we can protect them from (no, I am not going to nominate them), no matter how remote they really are (OK, one... allergic reactions to vaccines - one in a million chance of damages, against some % points of deaths in the pre-vaccination era, yet parents fret over this and consider the idea of withdrawing their sons from this or that vaccination campaign) and we get very hysterical about these dangers, asking out-of- proportion measures to politicians, who, being at least as guilty as we are and very eager to be seen as doing something, are quite happy to oblige.

So that we can feel better, buy a nice Suburban and vote PP (6) (or Republican, for those who live in the USA).

Humanity truly deserves extinction (7). 

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1) Its end should be nigh, but it's the third time I read that prophecy in my life... the IT industry is trying its best to find a way to keep pushing new stuff on the market. They may or may not pull it off, this time the fundamental physical limits of the tech seem harfer to push forward than ever. We'll see


2) Beyond the Google driving cars, I surmise that we will see automatized trucks and auto-buses way before we'll see cars. A 30.000$ "highway" automatic truck driver isn't much of an overhead on a 300.000$ Peterbuilt and it may re-pay itself in a couple of years or less, so I suppose that many "drivers" jobs will  follow the fate of the many "secretarial" jobs that have vanished since 2008 - replaced for middle level managers by a conspicuous use of smart-phones' apps and other automation tools, and with the bulk of these laid-off finally reabsorbed in low-wage sectors. By the way, this is just the technology that seems nearest to be released, to me.  Then, there are researchers working on semi-autonomous robots for small manufacturers, able to learn how to do a specific task by looking at how a master worker does it.  Any time between the next 15 to 25 years, I expect that there will be robots able to do any kind of work that is done in a workshop. Possibly, some will even be able to flip hamburgers in a McDonald. 

3) A man that I don't really like, Tyler Cowen ;

4) In  "The Great Stagnation"

5) From the depletion of many essential resources - like... phosphates? you didn't see that coming, but there is an estimated 50 years of the stuff, and after that, no more cleaners - to the arrival of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that will return surgery to the lottery with death that it was in the XIX century,  to possible pandemic scares, not forgetting the massive migratory movements that some of these will probably provoke, today's kids are in for a very interesting life.  

6) I live in Spain... the core of the PP, Partito Popular - which is no popular at all -  reform of middle-high-school separate paths for the upper and the lower tiers of the middle school student bod, with lyceum and university for the first, second-rate vocational high-schools for the latter... 
In substance, a generation that is often still toying on finding its way in their 50s wants kids of 13 to be already able to decide the path of their life.
Maybe, it's just to stifle even more an already anaemic social mobility, as PP sees itself as the party of the "hereditary middle bourgeoisie". Spain is just one European country, but similar ideas are circulating in all f. Europe.

7) I am personally favourable to human extinction, so I do not have kids and  I drive a 1990 Mercedes Benz W124 with a 2.0 L petrol engine. I have been atrociously offended, discovering that it does release less pollutants than one of the infamous Volkswagen TDIs... and me that I thought I was echo-unfriendly.